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I have visited Scala Exchange („#ScalaX“) in London on 2017-12-14 and 2017-12-15. It was great, better than 2015 in my opinion. In 2016 I missed Scala Exchange in favor of Clojure Exchange.

This time there were really many talks about category theory and of course its application to Scala. Spark, Big Data and Slick were less heavily covered this time. Lightbend (former Typesafe), the company behind Scala, did show some presence, but less than in other years. But 800 attendees are a number by itself and some talks about category theory were really great.

While I have always had a hard time accepting why we need this „Über-Mathematics“ like category theory for such a finite task as programming, I start seeing its point and usefulness. While functors and categories provide a meta layer that is actually accessible in Scala there are actually quite rich theories that can even be useful when constrained to a less infinite universe. This helps understanding things in Java. I will leave details to another post. Or forget about it until we have the next Scala conference.

So the talks that I visited were:

Keynote: The Maths Behind Types [Bartosz Milewski]

Free Monad or Tagless Final? How Not to Commit to a Monad Too Early [Adam Warski]

I was lucky to get a chance to visit Devoxx in Antwerp the sixth time in a row. As always there were interesting talks to listen to. Some issues that were visible across different talks:

Java 9 is now out and Java 8 will soon go into the first steps of deprecation. The step of moving to Java 9 is probably the hardest in the history of Java. There were features in the past that brought very significant changes, but they were usually kind of optional, so adoption could be avoided or delayed. Java 9 brings the module system and a new level of abstraction in that classes of modules can be made public to other modules selectively or globally. Otherwise they can be by themselves declared as public, but only be visible within the module. This actually applies to classes of the standard library, that were always declared as being private, but that could not be efficiently hidden away from external usage. Now they suddenly do not work any more and a lot of software has some difficulty and needs to be adjusted to avoid these internal classes. Beyond that a lot of talks were about Java 9, for example also covering somewhat convenient methods for writing constant collections in code. Future releases will follow a path that is somewhat similar to that of Perl 5. Releases will be created roughly every half year and will include whatever is ready for inclusion at that time. Some releases will be supported for a longer time than others.

In the arena of non-Java JVM-languages the big winner seems to be Kotlin, while Groovy, Clojure, JRuby and Ceylon where not visible at the conference. Scala has retained its position as an important JVM language besides Java at this conference. The rise of Kotlin may be explained by the fact that Idea (IntelliJ) has become much more important as IDE than Eclipse and Netbeans, which already brings Kotlin onto every JVM-language-developer’s desktop. And Google has moved from Eclipse to Idea as recommended and supported IDE for Android-development and is now officially supporting Kotlin besides Java as language for Android-development. There were heroic efforts to do development in Scala, Clojure, Groovy for Android without support from Google, which is quite possible, but having to deploy the libraries with each app instead of having them already on the phone is a big disadvantage. The second largest mobile OS has added support for Swift as an alternative to Objective C and Swift and Kotlin are different languages, but they are sufficiently similar in terms of concepts and possibilities to ease development of Apps targeting the two most important mobile system platforms in mixed teams at least a bit. And Kotlin gives developers many of the cool and interesting features of Scala, while remaining a bit easier to learn and to understand, because some of the most difficult parts of Scala are left out. Anyway, Scala is not yet heavily challenged by Kotlin and remains important and I think that Clojure and JRuby and Groovy retain their importance and live in somewhat differenct niches than Scala and Kotlin. I would think that they are just a bit too small to be present on each Devoxx. Or it was just random effects about how much news there was about the languages and what kind of speeches had been proposed for them. On the other hand, I would assume that Ceylon has become a dead end, because it came out at the same time as Kotlin and tries to cover the same niche. It is hard to stay important in the same niche with a strong winner.

Then there was of course security security security… Even more important than in the past.

I have attended the Swiss Perl Workshop.
We were a group of about 40 people, one track and some very interesting talks, including by Damian Conway.
I gave a regular talk and a lightning talk myself.
The content of my talk might go into another Blog post in the future.
The Perl programming language is still interesting, and of course it was covered in both variants: Perl 5 and Perl 6.
But many of the talks were about general issues like security and architecture and just exemplified by Perl.

Hot topics where Java 9 and the functional features of Java 8. But there was a wide range of talks. As in previous years visitors can watch all the talks that they missed or found interesting enough to re-watch online afterwards. In earlier years it was done with „Parlays“ and only available to visitors or to those who pay for it, while it is now available on youtube for everybody. Since the conference has been sold out long before it started, this does not seam to stop people from buying tickets for the conference.

I have visited Scala Days in Berlin 2016-06-15 to 2016-06-17. A little remark on the format might be of interest. The conference is scheduled for 3 days. On the first day, there is only one speech, the first keynote, some time in the late afternoon. During Scala Days 2015 the rest of the day was put into use by organizing a Scala training session, where volunteers could teach Scala to other volunteers who wanted to learn it. But I think two or three sessions on the first day would be better and would still allow starting in the late afternoon with the first keynote. The venue and of course Berlin were great and I enjoyed the whole event.

The talks that I visited were:

Wednesday 2016-06-15

First keynote: Scala’s Road Ahead by Martin Odersky about the future of Scala. Very interesting ideas for future versions that are currently explored in dotty.